AdWords Releases Super-Sized Ad Text Headlines

Breaking News: Google has this week modified their ad headline format giving you yet another reason to care about Quality Score. The new ad headline may display twice as much information as before, combining both your headline and description line 1 fields, into one super-big headline (with its larger, bolder font) where it’s most likely to be noticed.

This change in ad text headline format only affects high Quality Score ads that appear above the search results on Google. Additionally, it will only super-size your ad text if each line appears to be a distinct sentence and ends in the proper punctuation. The headline and description line 1 will be separated by a hyphen. Now, some top placement ads will have even longer, more eye-catching headlines. Here’s just one example of the longer ad text format for high quality score ads:

So in summary, I think that:

• It’s a small ad text change but hey, I’ll take any edge I can to get more visibility over competing text-ads, especially in competitive search verticals like “life insurance”. In the above screenshot, see how much the Accuquotelife.com Ad really stands out relative to the other ads. They included a period after the “Compare Rates and Save up to 70%.”, where as reliaquote.com did not include a period after “Compare Life Insurance Quotes”.
• The ad looks more like an organic SERP, which already displays the longer headline. This may trick more people into not realizing the difference and clicking on paid results.
• It’s yet another benefit of optimizing your campaigns for higher Quality Score, something that I strongly agree with.
• Going forward, consider not writing those ad texts that use the entire headline, description line 1 and description line 2 fields as one big run-on sentence!
• Instead, consider ending your description line one with a period, question mark or exclamation mark.
• And of course, (shameless plug) check out our PPC Tools for Quality Score optimization so you can take advantage of this longer ad text headline that is only available for high quality score ads!

(More: Revisiting the Economics of Quality Score: Why QS Is Up to 200% More Valuable in 2013)

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